Assumed I have the following files:

test12.txt
test13.txt
test14.txt
test15.txt

I want to delete the first 3 files with one command. How to do that?

rm test12.txt test13.txt test14.txt

magic.

or

rm test1[234].txt

Slightly less typing.

1 members found this post helpful.

This is the intelligent solution!

if there more than hundreds of files?

rm test1{103-300}.txt

rm test1*.txt

for num in $(seq 234 434); do
rm test${num}.txt
done

find . -maxdepth 1 -name "test1*.txt" -delete

1 members found this post helpful.

What acid_kewpie wanted to make you notice is that you did not provide many details about your requirement. In a real case you have to establish some criteria to select only a partial list of the files, using regular expressions and/or globbing. You can test your "selection" using ls and after you've carefully checked the result, you can do the same using the rm command.

If something goes wrong you can always restore the accidentally deleted files from your backup (do you have a backup, don't you?).

If you need to select files, based on numbering you can either use a character list as in the example by Tinkster, a numeric interval, shell's brace expansion or command substitution with seq.

Congrats Tink! You're officially a worthy human!

OK, I still like my solution. It did what was asked. In terms of key presses, i'd do...

rm [tab]2[tab][tab]3[tab][tab]4[tab][enter] so 13 in total.

for Tinks version that'd be:

rm [tab][234][tab][enter] so 10... Hmm, maybe you do win. that's 2.4 calories you saved!